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Great post. It really confirms everything we need to know about their design philosophy for accuracy bonuses, the flat math, etc. It does leave me with one question I've been wondering though, and I ask this in all honesty: If we assume that 5 goblins are a challenge to a party of 1st-level...

Not necessarily. Like I showed in my example, you might go one way and then decide that you don't need to go the other way. Or, by going one way, you may find something (information, an item, etc.) that will help you against what you find when you go down the other corridor. Beyond all that...

That sounds like the rules for aiding skill checks in 4e. You could say that, for perception checks, the party member with the highest perception makes the check, and anyone else who wants to try has to roll an assist and risk giving a stacking -1 penalty. So if the PC gets a 28 perception vs. a...

If your focus is on combat, think of it this way: exploration is what determines which combats you fight next, whether you fight in them, and under what conditions you engage them. For example, you're trapped atop a snowy mountain in an ancient fortress. Which corridor do you take? As a result...

You raise an excellent point, and the problem only gets worse as party size increases (one reason I dislike large parties). I've always thought that the "use a d20 for everything!" policy was strange given how the d20 automatically throws a massive degree of luck into any roll and dwarfs natural...

That's a really good idea. I know I had a mental list of "things I found conspicuously absent" when going through the rules the first time. A couple more: -Charging -Flanking

I hadn't even thought about poison and other such effects and their implications. If the only (or main) thing that separates higher and lower-level characters is HP and damage, and HP is supposed to largely represent non-direct hits, then the explanation falls apart when you have a swarm of...

Power replacement may not make narrative sense, but it's a good way to keep down the unwieldy number of powers that characters get.

The rules just consist of a lot more prose. Like, "To cast a spell, you have to wave your arms around and babble like a lunatic for six seconds" would be written in 4e like this: Cast Spell Standard action

I'm glad you posted this; I think it definitely needed to be said. Playtest the rules the way they are, and focus on the internal consistency of what you have. THEN if you want to try some new idea and can explain whether it worked better or worse, you can do that.

Dwarves' beards soak all the poison out of their bloodstreams. After the battle, they just have to wring out their beards (also an effective way for rogues to procure poison for later use)

I was just thinking over breakfast about whether it would be feasible to let advantage/disadvantage stack. I'll agree that 3 dice makes the chance of success obscenely high, but maybe that's not a bad thing? How often would someone be able to get 3 advantages, anyway, and shouldn't they be...

Oh yes, that is a change that I do like. No more experiencing this conversation with the DM: "I walk up to the door, open it, run into the room, and attack him!" "You can't do that, it's a minor action to open the door, you have to use a move action to move up to the door, and after opening it...

"Disadvantage" is a clear, simple counterpart to "advantage." "Hustle," on the other hand, is indeed pretty silly... They could have called it "sprint," "storm," "rush," etc. On this topic, I'm not sure how I feel about not just having a "move action" anymore. It seems like it can work just...

The rules suggest letting people automatically succeed if their ability score is the DC + 5. As for "taking 20," the rules say that if a character can spend 20 times the amount of time working on something, then the DM can let them automatically succeed, unless the task is impossible... beyond...

1) It doesn't specify that the target grants advantage, so no. However, a stunned or paralyzed target does specifically grant advantage to any attacker. 2) Maybe, but it's probably easier for a not usually sneaky person (like a warrior in plate mail) to stay out of sight of a deafened person...

No scythes? Wtf? Heads will roll.

Out of curiosity, what was wrong with level adjustment? I never played 3.5 except through Neverwinter Nights 2.

Shifters Tieflings I was also happy to see Kenku getting some love in a recent Dragon article.

It's just a very skillful or powerful blow. If you have >1/2 HP afterwards, you deflected the blow, but doing so really exhausted you (maybe you had to deflect a giant's club, or you had to weave and parry against a swordsman's flurry of strikes). If you have <1/2 HP, you were completely caught...